Twenty minutes later, having lost his remote and what cash he had left, Deke was striding past the broken soldiers of Best Buy.
“Now you let me tell you, boy,” Bobby Earl had said in a fatherly tone as, hand on shoulder, he led Deke back to the elevator. “You’re not going to win against a combat vet—you listening to me? I’m not even especially good, just an old grunt who was on hype fifteen, maybe twenty times. Ol’ Tiny, he was a pilot. Spent his entire enlistment hyped to the gills. He’s got membrane attenuation real bad . . . you ain’t never going to beat him.”
It was a cool night. But Deke burned with anger and humiliation.
“JESUS, THAT’S CRUDE,” Nance said as the Spad strafed mounds of pink underwear. Deke, hunched up on the couch, yanked her flashy little Braun remote from behind his ear.
“Now don’t you get on my case too, Miss rich-bitch gonna-have-a-job—”
“Hey, lighten up! It’s nothing to do with you—it’s just tech. That’s a really primitive wafer you got there. I mean, on the street maybe it’s fine. But compared to the work I do at school, it’s—hey. You ought to let me rewrite it for you.”
“Say what?”
“Lemme beef it up. These suckers are all written in hexadecimal, see, ’cause the industry programmers are all washed-out computer hacks. That’s how they think. But let me take it to the reader-analyzer at the department, run a few changes on it, translate it into a modern wetlanguage. Edit out all the redundant intermediaries. That’ll goose up your reaction time, cut the feedback loop in half. So you’ll fly faster and better. Turn you into a real pro, Ace!” She took a hit off her bong, then doubled over laughing and choking.
“Is that legit?” Deke asked dubiously.
“Hey, why do you think people buy gold-wire remotes? For the prestige? Shit. Conductivity’s better, cuts a few nanoseconds off the reaction time. And reaction time is the name of the game, kiddo.”
“No,” Deke said. “If it were that easy, people’d already have it. Tiny Montgomery would have it. He’d have the best.”
“Don’t you ever listen?” Nance set down the bong; brown water slopped onto the floor. “The stuff I’m working with is three years ahead of anything you’ll find on the street.”
“No shit,” Deke said after a long pause. “I mean, you can do that?”
IT WAS LIKE graduating from a Model T to a ninety-three Lotus. The Spad handled like a dream, responsive to Deke’s slightest thought. For weeks he played the arcades, with not a nibble. He flew against the local teens and by ones and threes shot down their planes. He took chances, played flash. And the planes tumbled. . . .
Until one day Deke was tucking his seed money away, and a lanky black straightened up from the wall. He eyed the laminateds in Deke’s hand and grinned. A ruby tooth gleamed. “You know,” the man said, “I heard there was a casper who could fly, going up against the kiddies.”
“JESUS,” DEKE SAID, spreading Danish butter on a kelp stick. “I wiped the floor with those spades. They were good, too.”
“That’s nice, honey,” Nance mumbled. She was working on her finals project, sweating data into a machine.
“You know, I think what’s happening is I got real talent for this kind of shit. You know? I mean, the program gives me an edge, but I got the stuff to take advantage of it. I’m really getting a rep out there, you know?” Impulsively, he snapped on the radio. Scratchy Dixieland brass blared.
“Hey,” Nance said. “Do you mind?”
“No, I’m just—” He fiddled with the knobs, came up with some slow, romantic bullshit. “There. Come on, stand up. Let’s dance.”
“Hey, you know I can’t—”
“Sure you can, sugarcakes.” He threw her the huge teddy bear and snatched up a patchwork cotton dress from the floor. He held it by the waist and sleeve, tucking the collar under his chin. It smelled of patchouli, more faintly of sweat. “See, I stand over here, you stand over there. We dance. Get it?”
Blinking softly, Nance stood and clutched the bear tightly. They danced then, slowly, staring into each other’s eyes. After a while, she began to cry. But still, she was smiling.
DEKE WAS DAYDREAMING, imagining he was Tiny Montgomery wired into his jumpjet. Imagined the machine responding to his slightest neural twitch, reflexes cranked way up, hype flowing steadily into his veins.
Nance’s floor became jungle, her bed a plateau in the Andean foothills, and Deke flew his Spad at forced speed, as if it were a full-wired interactive combat machine. Computerized hypos fed a slow trickle of high-performance enhancement mélange into his bloodstream. Sensors were wired directly into his skull—pulling a supersonic snapturn in the green-blue bowl of sky over Bolivian rain forest. Tiny would have felt the airflow over control surfaces.
Below, grunts hacked through the jungle with hype-pumps strapped above elbows to give them that little extra death-dance fury in combat, a shot of liquid hell in a blue plastic vial. Maybe they got ten minutes’ worth in a week. But coming in at treetop level, reflexes cranked to the max, flying so low the ground troops never spotted you until you were on them, phosgene agents released, away and gone before they could draw a bead . . . it took a constant trickle of hype just to maintain. And the direct neuron interface with the jumpjet was a two-way street. The onboard computers monitored biochemistry and decided when to open the sluice gates and give the human component a killer jolt of combat edge.
Dosages like that ate you up. Ate you good and slow and constant, etching the brain surfaces, eroding away the brain-cell membranes. If you weren’t yanked from the air promptly enough, you ended up with brain-cell attenuation—with reflexes too fast for your body to handle and your fight-or-flight reflexes fucked real good. . . .
“I aced it, proleboy!”
“Hah?” Deke looked up, startled, as Nance slammed in, tossing books and bag onto the nearest heap.
“My finals project—I got exempted from exams. The prof said he’d never seen anything like it. Uh, hey, dim the lights, wouldja? The colors are weird on my eyes.”
He obliged. “So show me. Show me this wunnerful thing.”
“Yeah, okay.” She snatched up his remote, kicked clear standing space atop the bed, and struck a pose. A spark flared into flame in her hand. It spread in a quicksilver line up her arm, around her neck, and it was a snake, with triangular head and flickering tongue. Molten colors, oranges and reds. It slithered between her breasts. “I call it a firesnake,” she said proudly.
Deke leaned close, and she jerked back.
“Sorry. It’s like your flame, huh? I mean, I can see these tiny little fuckers in it.”
“Sort of.” The firesnake flowed down her stomach. “Next month I’m going to splice two hundred separate flame programs together with meld justification in between to get the visuals. Then I’ll tap the mind’s body image to make it self-orienting. So it can crawl all over your body without your having to mind it. You could wear it dancing.”
“Maybe I’m dumb. But if you haven’t done the work yet, how come I can see it?”
Nance giggled. “That’s the best part—half the work isn’t done yet. Didn’t have the time to assemble the pieces into a unified program. Turn on that radio, huh? I want to dance.” She kicked off her shoes. Deke tuned in something gutsy. Then, at Nance’s urging, turned it down, almost to a whisper.
“I scored two hits of hype, see.” She was bouncing on the bed, weaving her hands like a Balinese dancer. “Ever try the stuff? In-credible. Gives you like absolute concentration. Look here.” She stood en pointe. “Never done that before.”